CUSEC 2010 Keynote: Matt Knox – “On Weakness”

by Joey deVilla on January 24, 2010

This is the first of a series of notes that I took while attending CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, which took place last week in Montreal. CUSEC is the biggest conference held by and for university students interested in software development. True to the Canadian techies punching well above their weight class (a great tradition started by Alexander Graham Bell), CUSEC manages to pull in big-name and up-and-coming speakers who’ve given talks that have outshined those I’ve seen an thousand-dollar-plus conferences.

His presentation, On Weakness, is about his life on the Dark Side and the lessons he gleaned from it. It’s based on his talk, Crimes Against Humanity, Writ Small, which he gave at FutureRuby last year, but it was good to see it again, and its message is probably even more valuable to students. My notes (which I polished for comprehensibility) and photos from his session appear below:

An Evil Job

How many of you are:

Technical, as opposed to business or arts students?

Engineering students?

Programmers?

Evil?

That’s what this talk is about

One way to describe one of my former jobs is doing “Windows hijinks with Scheme”

He hooked up with rising politicians with the same aesthetic sense, one of whom was Hitler

He started with creating buildings, but then became the Nazis’ chief logistics guy

Later, a leader of the U.S. Air Force said that had he been aware of Speer’s involvement as the Nazi’s chief logistics guy, he would’ve dedicated an entire wing of the Air Force exclusively to killing him

It’s been suggested that Speer prolonged the war by a year or two by running the German forces more efficiently

In the prank, the prankster calls a McDonald’s, gets an employee on the line and says “I’m a police officer. We have reason to believe that there is a thief in your restaurant and we need you to take them into the back and hold them until we arrive.”

They provide a description vague enough so that someone in the restaurant will match it

Once coralled in the back, the prankster starts giving orders to torture and/or humiliate the customer, and many employees have complied

So what does this mean?

The human brain has a remote root exploit in 70% of the installed base

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." — Steven Weinberg

Nope. Just authority.

There is hope: people who were subjects of the Milgram experiments turned out to be better at resisting authoritative coercion

The Power of Communication

Math: "There are only three reasonable numbers: 0, 1 and infinity"

When Robert Andrews Millikan did his oil drop experiments to determine the charge on an electron, he initially got the value wrong by 30 – 40%

People who repeated the experiment or conducted similar experiments with results close to Millikan’s erroneous number published their results

People who did so but got the correct value – which did not match Millikan’s value – didn;t publish, worried that they’d done something wrong, since their numbers didn’t agree with the number published by the authority on the subject

It’s from sword-making – until they figured out the process of making swords as one-piece, with hand-friendly stuff wrapped around the base so you could hold them, swords often flew off their handles in battle